Monica Potts

Monica Potts is a freelance writer, and former staff member of The American Prospect. A fellow with the New America Foundation Asset Building Program, her work has appeared in TheNew York Times, the Connecticut Post and the Stamford Advocate. She also blogs at PostBourgie.

Recent Articles

President Obama created a task force today that will be part of First Lady Michelle Obama's effort to address childhood obesity: Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may designate. Arguments over whether to do things like tax soda or ban junk food in schools usually break down when someone tries to argue that it means the government is telling you what to do. But it seems absurd to expand that argument to what children eat and whether they exercise, since children spend much of their time at schools and many do the bulk of their eating there. What they're given to eat and whether they're taught to be active can have a big...

The Indian government has put a hold, pending further study, on approving genetically modified eggplants. Government scientists approved the new crop last year, but this new move from Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh comes in response to public concerns, according to the BBC : The minister said "independent scientific studies" were needed to establish "the safety of the product from the point of view of its long-term impact on human health and environment". Mr Ramesh said it was "a difficult decision to make" since he had to "balance science and society". "The decision is responsible to science and responsive to society," he said. This is the kind of thing that makes Denialism author and New Yorker writer Michael Specter crazy, but I never understood why he was so on the GM foods bandwagon. The problem of world hunger isn't necessarily going to be solved by growing more foods more efficiently than we already do, because those foods still aren't going to find their way to the world's...

The New York Times has a story on what the Republicans hope to offer as a new health-care bill, if the Democrats and President Obama scrap the current legislation, which they are unlikely to do. In their plans, Republicans emphasize a free market -- their bill would provide tax credits to individuals and small businesses, expand high-risk pools, reform medical malpractice law, and allow insurance companies to sell plans across state lines. That these ideas alone are unlikely to bring down health-care costs considerably doesn't seem to concern Republicans. They also don't seem too troubled that their bill would not come close to covering 30 million uninsured Americans, as the bills that passed the House and Senate would. And they don't seem to care that many of their ideas are already in the bills. No, what they're really focused on is making sure that health reform happens in small steps: But Republicans say they can make incremental progress without the economic costs they contend...

It's not surprising that the response to the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad was a collective, "All that fuss for that ?" The spot mostly features his mom, Pam Tebow gushing about her miracle baby, only to be tackled by the son who grew up to be a Heisman Trophy winner. Both had big smiles for the camera. Of course, the spot directed you to the Web site for Focus on the Family , the conservative, anti-abortion group that funded the spot. There you can watch an interview with Pam Tebow and her husband, Bob, who elaborate a little on the back story. The Tebows were in the Philippines as missionaries when she became pregnant with Tim, their fifth child, and the pregnancy was complicated from the start. We know from other sources how likely it was that Pam Tebow's condition could have killed her, and why her doctors would have recommended an abortion to save her life. At the end, Bob Tebow makes a tearful plea to the camera: "Don't kill your baby." Drats! Feminists' nefarious baby-killing plans...

Washington Monthly has a fantastic feature detailing the efforts of ultra-conservatives to rewrite textbooks for Texas schools. Since Texas is such a big market, it will affect what's in textbooks around the country. The effort had been reported on before, but Mariah Blake adds some history, noting that the involvement of conservatives grew after efforts in the 1960s to teach a more inclusive history: This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. Among the changes? History books, for example, would emphasize the Christianity of America's founders and the role of...